In our last mega-battle over a certain Japanese magazine’s gleeful front-cover commercialization of a 14 year-old girl’s sexuality, I got mega-schooled at the very end by an anonymous commenter who dropped some names of other exploited low-teen girls back in the ’80s, who through a naive google image search, led to some of the most frightening images possibly lurking on the internet today. Okay, so this “let’s lust after real-life elementary school girls, everyone” thing is not new to post-war Japan. I concede that point.

But I do not retract my hate of Weekly Playboy, and this month’s cover story reminds me why they are so very, very terrible. While the rest of the world celebrates the nobler parts of the human community in the wake of Barrack Obama’s election, assholes at Playboy frame everything this way:

Obama vs. The Assassins: The Sniper Battle Has Begun!

Super classy, guys. Framing what would be the tragic murder of the U.S.’s brand new hope-inspiring African-American president as a sensational action movie plot.

Weekly Playboy is published by a mainstream publisher, but, it’s fair to say, does not represent the views of “mainstream Japanese.” That being said, Playboy does represent a certain “taste culture” that exists in Japan: let’s call it the “Asshole Faction.” Of course, they are jingoist anti-Asians, but I want to also point out that these 30 year-old angry dudes love child pornography, prostitution, and any other forms of institutionalized, social class-exploiting misogynistic services like adult video and hostess clubs. Maybe it’s only my imagination that there are still people out there who equate Japan’s enormous “sex business” with a progressive morality that transcends prudish “Christian” ethics, but if you are one of these people, deal with the fact that no one loves the Japanese sex business more than the Asshole Faction. It gives them something to do when not anticipating the assassination of the American president.

The Japanese government has started to treat a lot of the low-idol teen stuff as child pornography, so I am going to go with their definitions. If it makes you feel better, maybe we can call it child semi-pornography.

But see this is my point: there is a right-wing ideological bent to the pro-Saaya Iries out there, no?

“The Japanese government has started to treat a lot of the low-idol teen stuff as child pornography”

Have they ? that’s news to me.

If you are right, then sure, call it child semi-pornography.

What you fail to point out is that these cover models appear of their own volition and have not been forced into anything, as is usually the case with child pornography. They are “idols” in their own right, and seek to liquidize their assets in the most effective way, as we all do.

If they are old enough to bleed, they are bleeding old enough, as the coarse but true expression has it. And by the look of the size of tits on these cover girls I’ll bet money that they are also in possesion of puddle-gushing pudendal pulchritude.
They know what they are doing, and they want the money

Regarding the righ-wing ideological bent, that would be presumably the same bent that supposedly permeates all legislation and status quo in Japan,
that of the patriachal, confucionist top-down satsuma male ? Maybe.

Whatever the case, you’ve got a preoccupation with it and are looking for consensus. Good luck, as I don’t think you’ll find it in great measure.

it’s a fucking picture, she wasn’t forced to do it, and it didn’t damage her in any way. Anything else is just your own ridiculous post-modern self-projecting pretension. Funny how you’re presumably against forms X, Y and Z of bible belt irrational pseudo-moralistic grandstanding, but A, B and C are “so obvious, I don’t need to harp on the points”. The funny thing is you admit that Americans have been sexually repressed for centuries. Keep joing those dots, Marxy, you might get somewhere eventually.

“Regarding the righ-wing ideological bent, that would be presumably the same bent that supposedly permeates all legislation and status quo in Japan,that of the patriachal, confucionist top-down satsuma male?”

You know, I’m probably the one who has sparred with Marxy the most on the issue of rightwing thought in Japan (recently) and I don’t believe that he has ever claimed anything close to the above. Of course, I actually like debating with Marxy, not a straw man with a picture of Marxy taped to it.

I love this “Asshole Faction” idea. It allows us to get past all of that talk about how “mainstream” this all is and indentify a real, quantifiable target of analysis and scorn.

I recently wrote this on Mutantfrog in realtion to the Tamogami article scandal -
“While I don’t think that these ideas have sunk in to Japanese society to any great degree, from reporter to manga artist, doctor, lawyer, CEO, airforce, navy, etc. lots of 30-50 something, clearly unhappy Japanese guys of all walks of life have proven susceptible. Some do it in essay contests and some on 2ch. Tamogami should probably have stuck to ASCII.” From now on these guys are the “Asshole Faction”.

Weekly Playboy certainly isn’t the only tabloid in the world with that line on the new President. For instance, the Daily Express in Britain carried a similar story. The owner of that title is Richard Desmond who made his original fortune from porn including titles like “Asian Babes” which gives him something else in common with Weekly Playboy.

There was a time in the ’50s and ’60s when the leftist counterculture saw the “pink” industries as a proletarian thing. I don’t think that zeitgeist is still upon us.

The socialists were anti-prostitution after the war. The conservatives, of course, were pro-legal prostitution — wanting to protect “good girls.” Women’s groups — on both the left and right — were behind banning legal prostitution in the late ’40s, but somehow we are supposed to think that the old Japanese conservative line on prostitution speaks for all Japanese.

So yes, there have been ambivalences on the left about prostitution and adult films. But I don’t think Saaya Irie is an anyway comparable to a Wakamatsu Production socialist skin flick. In our era, where AV etc. is so totally commercialized and part of the capitalist system (which also enriches the yakuza, who are strong and violent supporters of the conservatives), I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to find a socialist way of thinking that society should not provide non-sex-related jobs to women and leave the mizu-shobai as the only possible option for a lot of uneducated working class women. That doesn’t mean an end to sex and eroticism, just the capitalist exploitation of women who are not given adequate options for living wage, career-path employment.

If you want to defend the pink salon as a socialist dreamland, that’d be interesting. I just explained the logic that guides my view. How about you?

The way you easily equate working as a hostess with working as a prostitute or porn actress, wouldn’t it be fair to say that your moral misgivings about mizu shobai businesses carry more weight with you than your political objections ? It doesn’t sound like you would become a regular patron even if you could be sure that your money wasn’t supporting organized crime and the staff all had good job opportunities elsewhere.

Has anyone ever met a (full-time career) hostess in Tokyo from Tokyo? The profession does not seem to attract a lot of middle-class, educated girls who choose it as a career. It seems to be the only job that pays enough to live in Tokyo for girls without the economic and social capital to support their move to the big city. And again, hostess bars’ mortal enemy is more women in corporate management positions.

So even if the nature of hostessing is not as bad as being a full-fledged prostitute, its flourishing is inversely proportional to gender equality in employment opportunity. It’s a symptom of a bad disease.

“If you want to defend the pink salon as a socialist dreamland, that’d be interesting. I just explained the logic that guides my view. How about you?”

LOL. I’ve no perception of the pink salon as such. I was simply stating that I can hold staunchly left-of-centre political views while having no problem with such establishments. Like the idols in the pages of Weekly Playboy, no-one’s coerced into anything they don’t want to do (I’ll concede that the largely Chinese-run brothels ‘employing’ illegal immigrants are indeed another matter however).

The impression I largely get from girls working in hostess bars, pink salons and the like is that they see it as a quick way to get cash for an LV bag or whatever; they don’t seem to be doing it simply in order to survive (Yoshigyu and 7-11 are there for that). Or to foot a crack bill as often the case in Europe and the States. Ridiculous as it seems to me; I mean I certainly wouldn’t eat out a sweaty middle-aged women in order to get that Comme suit, but there you go…

This comparison made me laugh: ‘So even if the nature of hostessing is not as bad as being a full-fledged prostitute…’. Why do you perceive the two roles as somehow entwined?? Would you judge geisha in the same sweeping manner I wonderr? Okay, the girls at the local キャバクラ may not be educated in Rimpa, but the principle’s the same; flattery for sale.

I agree fully with David, and I am quite puzzled by some of the most reactive and aggressive comments above, …

In this over-saturated sex industry, the only remaining taboo is child abuse, and it is exactly what is at stake here. Allusions to it is going mainstream. Consume and indulge in always more insane and twisted media coverage is today’s twisted media paradigm.

Cuteness and sexuality are two different worlds which borders are often blurry here in Japan; A simple example: there is now clothing brands for young kids with “Bitch” printed at the back of super short miniskirts, pseudo sexy punk bondage outfits for very young girls, etc…, can you imagine that 15 years ago or can you imagine that in western supermarkets? it is sad really, to see a sophisticated society lowering its vigilance. Pucket-Japan, same lame boat when it come to respect the rights of the children in that matter.

Idol books used to be a subculture, porn also, and as a subculture, you had to go to special shops, ect…and you were discriminated in the society by being an otaku, since already 10 years it is going すこしずつ everyday more mainstream, legitimized and industrialized in popular format… so if you think this has to do with freedom of thought or of speech, or a way to legitimize an underground culture, let me be clear: we are not in th sixties anymore, it is an industry, a multimillion dollar juicy business, just meet the guys behind it, how they recruit, how they exploit, and how they are taking over the business.
Playboy weekly is fascism of thought, but is not the only one at the magazine stand in your favorite Lawson, often you can find these type of publications just next to the non-sex mangas for kids or adults.
This is disgusting.

There are parents buying those clothes, there are wankers buying those publications and Dvds, and there are kids living in this world.
Violence in gaming (GTA) is already going over the top, the internet as we know is crippled with this mafia sex business, and we should all call that freedom? It is a dirty business that’s all, and the sign of a society in deep state of depreciation and loss of self-control and just basic common sense.

Obama is the one with the snipers on his side. I went to a rally and let me tell you, it was really fucking creepy to see the guys with guns and binoculars on top of every building and the suits in the windows surveying the place. I knew intellectually that they were the good guys (and making things safer), but it still made me feel nervous.

As for the defenders of this “low teen semi-pornography”, it’s pretty obvious that they are 100% concerned with their own perceived right to get off and 0% concerned about the girls themselves, so it’s hard to take their arguments at all seriously with all. To pretend like we live in some sort of magic land where females can freely choose whether or not to be sex objects (and aren’t punished for their choice!) and 13-ish year old girls have agency in an adult industry is clearly acting in one’s own interest and nothing else.

I think it is absurd to suggest that the only way a young girl arriving in Tokyo can live in the city is by becoming a hostess.

This is where class makes a difference. If you have social capital (i.e., connnections) and parental support, sure you can do whatever you want. But for those who have nothing and have to somehow come up with ¥3-400,000 just for a downpayment on an apartment, hostessing is the only industry that will pay enough to provide the capital in a short time. Working at a 7-11 makes this a lot harder.

“or can you imagine that in western supermarkets? it is sad really, to see a sophisticated society lowering its vigilance. Pucket-Japan, same lame boat when it come to respect the rights of the children in that matter.”

I didn’t really want to come back to American (North American) comparisons again but the above comments make me wonder – when is the last time that you have been in a big North American city in summer? They sell mini-skirts and short shorts for little girls in Japan, yes. However, I just don’t see them that often (thankfully). In NA, however, there is nothing uncommon about seeing an 11 year old in a micro-mini skirt and with a bare midriff – something seen very rarely in Japan. In malls, I’d hazard a guess that you would find about 1/3 of girls dressed like this these days. When I see these girls I want to throw a barrel with suspenders over them and slap thier parents.

This Japan = “Pucket” idea is off the wall. We should be criticising the “Asshole Faction” here, but there is no reason to trot out “the West” as some sort of faultless, ethereal ideal.

“I think it is absurd to suggest that the only way a young girl arriving in Tokyo can live in the city is by becoming a hostess.”

While I’m not a fan of hostessing, have never gone to a club, and really only know the business through manga and V-Cinema (which usually don’t make it look that good, come to think of it), I still have to wonder about the issue of agency in all of this.

We can blame the “system”, sure. We can blame the media for putting forward unrealistic images of the way that the “kachi-gumi” live, we can blame the magazine industry for leading young women to think that they aren’t a whole person without a 130,000 yen handbag… but what about the girls? Don’t they have to take some responsibility for their choices?

I know working class girls who breezed into Todai, girls who didn’t see opportunities in Japan so saved from their 140,000 yen a month jobs and got out (and are almost universally working crappy jobs overseas), girls who worked their way through medical school and are living it up, unmarried, in their corner of the inaka. Then there are girls who went to the big city and decided to make money with their looks because they never used their brains or started hostessing because they never wanted anything else in life other than feeling like a “celeb”. Lots of girls bash their heads on the glass ceiling, some break it, some never even look to see if one is there.

M-Bone, do you know how much it sucks to bash your head on the glass ceiling? It’s hard for me to look down on anyone for not wanting to go that route, especially if you don’t have money and you aren’t made out of the stuff to “breeze into Todai” or become a doctor.

And a lot of the seemingly frivolous stuff that women buy (like LV bags)? It becomes a lot less frivolous seeming if you fully understand the social consequences of not participating, especially in Japan. Women have to keep themselves up to a certain standard pretty much no matter who they are and that shit costs money and it take up a lot of time.

Is it possible to opt out? Yeah. But it’s a hard road with constant battles, especially if you are less privileged. If some women can’t or don’t want to fight and they do have some kind of leverage with their looks it’s hard to hate on them when the deck is otherwise stacked against them.

In a fair world I really wouldn’t care if women want to sell themselves or their time (or if men wanted to buy, but I’m not talking about that), but their choices are not made in a vacuum. Slut-shaming is not helpful.

“M-Bone, do you know how much it sucks to bash your head on the glass ceiling?”

No. I admit that I don’t through personal experience. The vast majority of hostesses don’t either, however, because they never touched the bottom of the ladder in the first place.

“Women have to keep themselves up to a certain standard pretty much no matter who they are”

Overstatement. Is your Japan experience limited to Tokyo? The most happy Japanese women that I know don’t throw away 200 hours salary on a handbag.

“you aren’t made out of the stuff to “breeze into Todai” or become a doctor.”

At some point you have to work very hard, think about difficult, often painful problems, etc. in order to find out exactly what stuff you are made out of. Many people, men and women, couldn’t be bothered.

“Slut-shaming” is not really what I’m out to do here. I don’t think that hostesses are sluts at all. If an individual wants to be a hostess, wants the bag, etc. and they are willing to take responsibility for their choices, that is fine by me (although I won’t extend the same argument to minors). I just don’t like suggestions that Japanese women of certain social strata are somehow universally trapped with no control over their destiny. Trying to acknowledge their volition here.

Data earlier this year revealed that 10% of the population of Japan lives in Tokyo while, if you include Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama, that figure rises to 27.3%. Over half the country lives in the three major metropolitan areas of Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo. As you would expect from those numbers, a large number of people moving in have family or friends they can rely on to at least give them space on a floor while they get settled. There are also plenty of young girls arriving in Tokyo with a float from their parents and or grandparents to get them over the downpayment hurdle who wouldn’t consider themselves to be wealthy or socially connected.

In some of your comments in other posts, you have suggested that a girl might choose to be a hostess because she considers her prospects over time as an office worker to be inferior. You now seem to be taking a harder line and suggesting that girls have no choice but to become hostesses from day one in Tokyo. I think you are getting carried away. Of course, if some girls they want to get their bank balance ticking over, then hostessing holds out that promise but to suggest that it is a matter of basic survival for a girl arriving in Tokyo sounds like the premise for a story in Weekly Playboy.

Hostessing is a commission-based sales job and that category encompasses an increasing number of industries which all draw in young female workers: selling second-hand cars for Gulliver; travel packages for HIS, cosmetics for Dr Ci Labo, eikaiwa lessons, Amway etc. Personal networks have always been strong in Japan but, twenty years ago, you could have left your hometown for the big city and mostly lost contact with everyone except when you saw them for school reunions. Mobile phones, the internet and communities like mixi have changed that. Companies have cottoned on to the fact that young people maintain strong and large personal networks and offer job opportunities where they can turn them into cash. However, few hostesses would consider tapping their school contacts to develop a client base.

It’s not easy getting a decent income from that kind of work but it’s no cakewalk being a hostess either. Not everyone is suited to the pressure of having a quota to fill which is why there are so many girls living in Tokyo who don’t do that work.

I admit going to a kyabakura earlier in the year for exactly one hour, and you have a right to be skeptical about why I went, but I had been reading Koakuma Ageha and wanted to see what was up. (And my friend often frequents and was in town.)

Anyway, even though 27.3% of people live in the Tokyo outer areas, all the girls I met in this one hour seemed to be from the most remote, unknown villages in Japan’s most remote, unknown prefectures. Sure, this is anecdotal, but if you are from Chiba or Kanagawa, and can live at home, why even become a hostess? The parasite single lifestyle gives you a lot of disposable income and is a lot less demanding.

The impression I largely get from girls working in hostess bars, pink salons and the like is that they see it as a quick way to get cash for an LV bag or whatever

Here’s the thing about luxury goods. My guess is that the demand is a U shape along family income: the biggest peaks are for nouveau riche at the top and then working class. (For why conspicuous consumption is more important for poor communities, check this The Atlantic article.) But obviously middle-class young women also own a lot of LV. But think about it, if you are rich, you just use your own pocket money to buy one, or get it from parents as a present. If you are a middle-class OL, you live at home and save up your money. Those at the bottom, however, who have no education and have an even sharper social need to possess these goods, being a hostess may be the only way to do it. So yes, many hostesses may want to live a “normal” Japanese luxury lifestyle, but the circumstances of the rural working classes disproportionately make them the prime recruiting target.

Also, I forgot to mention that a lot of hostess clubs offer dorms, one of the few female-targeted professions that includes this that doesn’t require some kind of qualifications. (Nurses often also get dorms.)

I know working class girls who breezed into Todai

Individuals have agency, but I would guess that working class women, whose parents may have never gone to college and denigrate the need for education within the household, tend not to have the environmental factors that lead them to a more stable middle-class-bound career. And with less and less working class jobs out in the countryside, hostessing may be one thing that lets you live a glamorous life without having to change your value system towards self-ambition and education. No one is forcing you, but the industry depends upon class inequity for recruitment.

Not everyone is suited to the pressure of having a quota to fill which is why there are so many girls living in Tokyo who don’t do that work.

There are also a lot of Tokyo-born, educated women who would never consider being a full-time hostess for a second. I don’t think the pressures of the job are the determining factor. That determines how long people stay on the job. How obvious are the downsides to someone from Iwate who reads about how great the lifestyle is in Koakuma Ageha (which is funded of course by the hostess industry)?

“I admit going to a kyabakura earlier in the year for exactly one hour”

I won’t hold it against a pop culture critic for going just to cast a critical eye. I have thought about going myself but have not because it does not really intersect with what I work on (and my wife would beat me).

“environmental factors that lead them to a more stable middle-class-bound career.”

Environment is going to be an unfortunate ball and chain for many people. The Todai breezer that I mentioned, however, was the daughter of a GSDF grunt who signed up straight out of high school. Environment, of course, does not explain everything. Not all lower class households fail to value education, either.

“hostessing may be one thing that lets you live a glamorous life without having to change your value system towards self-ambition and education.”

In an existentialist sort of way, I do believe that people can make choices to change their value system in this way. Becoming a hostess seems to be a choice to not try. That, however, can be happiness for some people, I guess.

In any case, I think that there are some “system”-based limits, you think that there is room for agency and radical changes of values – we seem to have found middle ground on this.

I’ve always thought that this idea that hostesses are “masters of conversation” and “knowledgeable about politics and current events” is a bit silly. They very well might be. But if that is really what a guy wants, he should just bring a 6000 yen bottle of wine to a university polisci department on a Friday night and chat with the female grad students (you really could make a hobby of this simply by paying the nominal fee that university departments charge to give an outsider “kenkyusei” status). Of course, this would most likely make the guy feel pretty ignorant.

“too many Japanese girls work in the sex industry man,
like..nearly all of them, or at least all of them from the countryside,
and it’s sick, I mean think about the child porn and the right wing
is probably controlling it, the bastards, so fucked up”

Pathetic. Thread after thread trying to find people to agree with his
puritanitical, reactionary rants. I wonder how long it will be until
another thread emerges about Saya Irie and how weekly playboy
is run by “nasty men”. (probably accompanied by some lame play on kanji)

To suggest that most girls coming to Tokyo from the countryside work
in mizu shobai shows an alarming level of naivety.

For the record…they don’t.

sure there are magazines like “Momo” which are advertising jobs
that pay 800,000 yen a month, but this means tossing off
man after man, presumably requiring you to be either
totally desensitized, in debt to the mob or to see ejaculation
as nothing more than a sexy sneeze. If they can both be cleaned
up with tissues, what’s the difference?

In cities like London and New York a large number of people
are involved in the supply of cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis
to bolster their meagre Mcjobs. (an ounce of weed can give you a weeks
smoking material and a tidy sum to pay for drinks and dinner if you know
what you are doing). And you can still claim personal use for relatively
small amounts meaning that altenative income through drugs is worthwhile.
In Japan the risks are just too high and so people have to turn to
legitimate forms of get rich quick schemes, namely mizu shobai and
hosting.

Every city has a sex industry, but there are more girls who don’t work
in it and shun it than those who do. And those that do often have very
few other options except flipping steaks.

Since Meiji when Yoshiwara was lauded and encouraged by the government
as contributing to a libidinal economy, mizu shobai has become an
accepted way for people to earn money. The soapy echelons though are
way different from simply hostessing and pouring drinks and earning
money through providing “amae”

As Mulboyne said though, supermarkets in Europe were selling
childrens clothes saying “sexy bitch” and “made to be laid”
10 years ago, and teen magazines ran features
like “ten tips for oral sex”. Capitalism stoops very low
as people will put out whatever sells, including kiddy porn.

““Women have to keep themselves up to a certain standard pretty much no matter who they are”

Overstatement. Is your Japan experience limited to Tokyo? The most happy Japanese women that I know don’t throw away 200 hours salary on a handbag.”

No, I’ve spent 3 days in Tokyo. I used to live in Kagoshima. That said, even if the specifics are different, women generally spent a pretty good amount of time and money on how they look and most men either don’t think about or think it’s “silly and dumb”, only to turn around and scorn women who aren’t hot enough.

I think I misunderstood you though and I’m sorry about that. Too often women are blamed for acting sexually and it’s either totally their prerogative or it’s a very unfair accusation. Or both!

(I think I’m especially wary of douchebags in Japan-related forums because it seems like there are a fair number of Western guys who are interested Japan who have serious women issues (because Japanese girls are so quiet and obedient and submissive, doncha know). I’ve also met a ton of cool people too, both men and women, but still. I imagine you know the type I’m talking about.)

Lauren’s comments make me realize that a bunch of men discussing Saaya Irie and hostessing is basically a pointless conversation. Even if I consider myself “feminist,” this does not mean my views represent those of women. I vote for more female voices! (I don’t know how to make that happen though…)

“I admit going to a kyabakura earlier in the year for exactly one hour”

Yes, this is obviously why we should respect your learned opinion on this matter. While I am down with the fact that plural of anecdote does not equal data, that you dont even have anecdotes.

“I would guess that working class women, whose parents may have never gone to college and denigrate the need for education within the household, tend not to have the environmental factors that lead them to a more stable middle-class-bound career.”

you’re really a classist dick. Please pontificate more on the desires and family lives of the lower-and-middle class japanese people who you know so well, Mr. Lives in Tokyo, Works at the Diamond Agency and Cant even be bothered to speak to a hostess for more than an hour. Cultural Critic you may be, but studs terkel you certainly arent.

I think if you actually talked to most hostesses, you would quickly realize that there are numerous different stratas of hostesses, who work in different style establishments, for a wide variety of reasons.
From my own, admittedly anecdotal experience (which includes not only my patronage of these establishments, but my friends and ex-coworkers who have worked at them), most are not the poor stupid bumpkins you make them out to to be.

Some want to open their own businesses, some what nice bags, some want to travel, some because its short hours for high pay, some because they want to find rich husbands. Some get stuck in it,

Pretty much the same reason girls work any job in Japan (or anywhere). And given that Tokyo is an incredibly cheap city to live in (did you know there are lots of places where you dont have to play shikikin or reikin? and rents are often 6man a month or less? and girls often live with roommates in the same room?) Hostessing is very obviously a choice (and i know plenty of poor girls from the country who havent choosen it, and well off girls from tokyo who have).

Granted, Many of them also could not afford the Juku’s that would have allowed them to get into the schools that would allow them to get upper class jobs with easy advancement positions, but many have college or post-secondary educations and work in the same middle-class OL jobs you “suggest” for them. most of them also realize that these jobs offer poor salaries and little room for advancement or that their chosen fields pay so little as to make extra work a viable choice. (guess what, this what most low-level salary men and even lower class japanese men realize this too!) Some of them also choose to hostess because entering fields or taking jobs that do pay well or allow for advancement would require time and social sacrifices that they arent willing to make (like say transfers, long hours, 接待 – sacrifice of marital opportunity, etc etc etc)

後門派 – This however is a great name for a band, or a shirt you could try and sell at a boutique in ni-chome. awesome.

I dunno, I based that observation off an anthropological treatise I read. That still makes me a dick, of course, but I don’t know if it’s just some belief I made up out of nowhere…

Mr. Lives in Tokyo, Works at the Diamond Agency and Cant even be bothered to speak to a hostess for more than an hour. Cultural

“The Diamond Agency.” That makes my job sound fancy! Hey, if I could speak to hostesses and not be charged for it, I would find it interesting. I just don’t have ¥6000 an hour to burn. Why not spend that on your actual girlfriend/wife/real life instead of your temporary fantasy speaking partner?

Cultural Critic you may be, but studs terkel you certainly arent.

Did the format of my blog give that away? Have you not seen the “narratives” section?

most are not the poor stupid bumpkins you make them out to to be.

Stupid is not a word I used. Being uneducated does not equal stupidity. Education in Japan is extremely linked to occupational activity, so goodbye to any kind of white-collar options if you did not finish high school. Whether those girls are dumb or not, is besides the point. Not attending college limits your occupational options — especially if you want to make a lot of money quickly.

In any individual’s case, the reasons will be different, but their options are clearly determined by social structure. I am not suggesting that anyone could predict a single hostesses’ reasons for joining up. But I think on the macro, you could probably say, for example, that girls graduating from Tokyo University and Waseda are not contemplating becoming a full-time hostess after graduation. Also if you look at magazines like Koakuma Ageha, the style is clearly targeting women who had children at 18-20 are divorced and work in the hostess industry. This gives a very specific life experience that has nothing to do with the “normal” life portrayed in the Japanese media. Someone must fit into this stereotype if it’s the sympathetic “reader voice.”

Look, I know I open myself up for massive criticism everytime I try to question any part of Japan’s sexual economy. A lot of people love this part of Japan. And there will be some kneejerk defense of it against what is seen as a “puritanical response.” There will be lots who do not see the harm it has on society.

My personal opinion, which could be totally insane, is that the Japanese would be better off having a lot more free market / non-commercial sex instead of putting the majority of sexual gratification as a market function. They should also take all the money paid out from corporations to the sex industry and use that to increase women’s salaries, which are still pathetically low compared to men’s. I, like many Japanese, also do not think that low-teen semi-porn is a great thing either, but a bunch of anonymous males from the anglosphere disagree.

Really, I encourage all of the pro-Saaya Irie types to start blogging about 12 year-old semi-porn being a great thing — under their real names. That would be more interesting that me just harping about the same things all the time.

Moderator: Please get back to the relationship between Obama assassin stories and Weekly Playboy’s aesthetic. This is not a post about hostesses.

OK, back on topic — maybe Playboy still can’t really believe America elected a black president? I mean, those are only in the movies, right?

Even without low-teen porn, aren’t most of these weeklies exploiting people’s cynical tendency to believe in the wildest conspiracies? I mean, how often do the women’s weeklies imagine awful scenarios? I am just not seeing a direct link.

ZAITEN magazine, covering industry and finance, has a cover story on “Japan’s own freemasons” about some club at Keio, and did you see the ads for Bungei Shunju recently? They are adopting remarkably similar sensationalism.

Your post may not have been about hostesses but the way you brought that subject into the discussion points to the weakness of your overall argument. You still haven’t backed up your assertion that the only way a girl from out of town can get by in Tokyo is by becoming a hostess. That was an extravagant claim with no basis in reality and the tone of your piece smacks generally of overkill.

You don’t like Weekly Playboy’s take on the assassination threat and it leads you to make observations specific to that magazine and its readers. How different is their take from the rest of the world’s tabloids? I mentioned the Daily Express above but a quick search (some reports say that “Obama assassination” became the top Google search term) shows virtually all of them have covered that angle in one form or another. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that, in the run-up to election day, police claimed to have actually uncovered an assassination plot. If the Weekly Playboy article is part of a global trend, how valid are criticisms specific to Japan which use that piece as a jumping off point?

Perhaps its the sensationalism of the headline which angered you most. Two points I would make: the magazine market appears to be in crisis – even the Yomiuri Weekly is being pulled off the market – so sensationalist headlines are to be expected, even for fairly mundane articles, as just one desperate measure to retain reader’s interest. I’d also argue that British tabloid headline writers can give anyone a run for their money in the offensiveness stakes.

It’s extremely disingenuous to believe that you are simply being criticized by people who want to defend their right to look at underage porn and hang out in hostess clubs. I took you to task earlier, when you suggested that glamour shots of a 17 year old were evidence of Japan’s unique moral degradation, by pointing out that the world’s largest-selling English language tabloid, owned by Rupert Murdoch, ran topless pictures of 16 year olds in its pages for decades. I can see why shutting your eyes to these trends elsewhere in the world would make it easier to lump together all the traits you most dislike and pin them on one group in Japan but that doesn’t make it a valid exercise.

Do Weekly Playboy readers represent the main customer base of hostess clubs? Are they the main buyers of adult videos? Are they the main clients for prostitutes? In your world, the answer is yes. The man who goes to a hostess club is just as likely to buy a prostitute and pick up a teen porn DVD on the way home because you find all those activities morally repulsive. You would rather conflate them than wonder whether they represent different market segments and so your analysis and conclusions suffer accordingly.

I viewed this headline through the prism of Weekly Playboy’s usual politics: dumb, angry jingoism. Other “tabloids” did not use this story as their main political feature. This could have been a page 10 story, but Playboy went for page 1.

ran topless pictures of 16 year olds in its pages for decades.

Why did they stop?

At this point, forget the 16 and 17 year-olds. I abandon that outrage for now. I ask you though, if we are talking moral equivalency as a way to stop the conversation, how many camel-toe 12 year olds and 9 year-olds did Murdoch put in his newspapers?

Are they the main clients for prostitutes? In your world, the answer is yes.

I remember a Weekly Playboy headline that was to the effect of “They are trying to shut down our beloved prostitution.” Obviously johns come from all walks of life, but I do think that Playboy readers tend to own the lifestyle. They are in it to win it. Prostitution and its sister industries are an affirmative part of their idea of masculine virtue. I think it’s fair to say that they are wholly fine with the objectification of women.

This post was never meant to be the “neutral objective take on this issue.” I am clearly a partisan. I regret writing it in that I don’t really want validation on my opinions. I think the size of the sex business in Japan is related to occupational sexual inequality. Settai probably existed to a similar level in the U.S. in the 1960s (check Mad Men), but female managers have wrecked this system. I don’t think it’s even “cultural” as much as structural, a product of how opportunity and money are passed along. And which demographics possess the power to control the state of “norms.” A powerful social movement tried to make prostitution illegal in the pre-war only to be shut down by the conservatives in the Lower House who were in bed with the brothel owners. The distribution of political power matters. Prostitution became illegal in the ’50s as a result of a women’s movement.

But back to the point of my original rant: I do see a thread between right-wing Japanese jingoism, anti-Asian sentiment, pro-prostitution, and pro-adolescent sexual commercialism. (Murdoch also fits this to a degree, no?) I think Weekly Playboy represents a congregation of these threads more than any other. Not all taste cultures in Japan back these beliefs. Brutus, for example, tends to either implicitly or explicitly reject these stances. (Remember, Brutus did the whole issue on why Japanese “adult women” are hot in conscious response to the low teen boom.) Cyzo gives a lot of attention to the dark side of the sex industries.

Sure, there was hyperbole in my statement about girls coming to Tokyo, but I still think an objective look at hostess origins — which may exist and should be looked at to settle the matter, instead of my speculation — would find a predominance of women from non-Tokyo origin with low levels of education. There has always been a class element in determining who becomes a mizu shobai worker, even though agency is (now in 2008) with the individual.

I just did an interview with Yasumasa Yonehara, which I hope will go up soon, where he talks about the rise of kyaba-jo culture as an inverse proportion to economic prosperity. I don’t think this is random.

The man who goes to a hostess club is just as likely to buy a prostitute and pick up a teen porn DVD on the way home because you find all those activities morally repulsive.

This is a distortion of my position. I would say that the social structure tends to push similar types of candidates into these jobs. I find this system to be lacking in terms of social justice (not sexual mores), but moreover, I find the celebration of this system without note to a possible class bias problematic. Prostitution is a necessary evil, at best. Do women want to celebrate it as much as men do?

I don’t think anyone would argue with Yonehara that kyabakura evolved as the economy declined. As company expense accounts were cut back, there were fewer groups heading to hostess clubs and dropping over 50,000 yen a head. The industry therefore exploited a legal loophole to create kyabakura which were cheaper to run and much cheaper for customers. I remember touching on this in a couple of comments to your “Little Devils” post.

[url]http://meta.neojaponisme.com/2008/02/15/little-devils/[/url]

I mentioned there that as police cracked down on kyabakura, many were turning into “Girl’s Bars”. In recent weeks, police have begun to crack down on these too.

I was thinking of making this point about recession and kyabakura earlier because I think you were guilty of falling for the media line that all kyabajo earn good money. In truth, large numbers hope to do so but, after costs, often do no better than they would as an office worker which is why many give up. For others it’s a second income to supplement their day job because the hours allow them to double up. They wouldn’t earn enough from either alone to put any money away.

Of course, this doesn’t lead to the conclusion that hostess clubs thrive in recessions. They did much better during the bubble and the high rewards on offer at that time found many takers even while genuine job opportunities elsewhere were plentiful. In Britain, the economic expansion, which has recently come to an abrupt halt, was accompanied by a huge increase in strip clubs and lap dancing bars. Many gyms offered pole dancing classes as a way to tone those muscles. The rise of the kyabajo might make it seem like the industry expanded during the recession but that would be the same mistake as assuming the taxi business was booming because more people were becoming drivers. Just a couple of months ago, the Naitai group went bankrupt. As well as publishing Naitai Sports, they were also major publishers of specialist hostess and host club magazines.

One thing that has changed, which might be worthy of note, is that the social stigma attached to working in mizu shobai businesses appears to be much lower than before. A couple of years ago, the DPJ selected 27 year old Kazumi Ota as their candidate for a constituency in Chiba. Her opponents launched a smear campaign alleging she had worked as a hostess. In response, she admitted that she had done so for a few months and the reaction was generally positive. I don’t think the public thought it was a respectable job but they recognized that working in a club wasn’t the same as being a prostitute and weren’t going to hold it against a girl who they saw as just trying to make ends meet. She won.

Lauren – Thank you very much for the nice follow-up. I don’t think that either of us paid enough attention to the other’s posts the first time around.

“I think I misunderstood you though and I’m sorry about that. Too often women are blamed for acting sexually and it’s either totally their prerogative or it’s a very unfair accusation. Or both!”

The point that I was trying to make originally is actually a feminist one. One of the reasons that ordinary women were left out of historical writing and research until a few decades ago was that they were widely believed to have no ability to act for themselves outside of set social roles. In other words, women did not “make history”. Marxy and I have been debating on and off for over a year about just where social constraints stop and personal choice becomes the major factor (BTW, I don’t think that Marxy is deliberately trying to deny female agency).

You were no doubt put on guard by my tone when it came to handbags, etc. Let me assure you, while I don’t like expensive fashion consumption by working class or moderately well to do people (as I would like to see more people spending money on genuine self improvement – learn another language, read a great book, etc.), I apply this to both men and women.

I second Marxy’s comment that a bunch of guys talking about which feminist trope (women as historical agents or women as victimized by social and cultural circumstances) is most useful to describe hostesses is odd and that new points of view are most definitely welcome.

“sensationalist headlines are to be expected, even for fairly mundane articles, as just one desperate measure to retain reader’s interest.”

I made a similar argument here a few months ago. Playboy has seen its sales drop dramatically (I think that it was nearly by half but could not find the link again) since 2000. This corresponds exactly with the period in which they became more “assholish”. I think that this goes to show that they are doing what they are doing to appeal to a certain niche audience.

“Do Weekly Playboy readers represent the main customer base of hostess clubs? Are they the main buyers of adult videos? Are they the main clients for prostitutes? In your world, the answer is yes.”

I have to agree with Mulboyne, here. I think that we can make a connection between denigration of women and neo-nationalist Korea and China bashing on a qualitative level, but there is no way to quantify the larger sex industry point.

I’ve been sitting on this bomb for a while, waiting to use it the next time Japan’s relative sex industry and hostesses came up, but what about strippers in the United States?

Class bias – check
Inequality – check
Ethnicity – check
Often exploitative work enviornment – check
Clubs visited casually by men – check
Exploit girls coming to major urban areas to work in fashion / entertainment / film / music – check
M-Bone has never been to a club – check

Lots of structural similarities, no?

I don’t see a way to prove this, I’ll also raise the possibility that there are considerably more strippers in the United States than there are hostesses in Japan.

I think that your points are stronger if you leave them as a critique of Japan and don’t try to make the culture into such an outlier. This type of thing abounds.

Are corporate dollars the main source of revenue for strip clubs in the US? My guess is that private usage accounts for most. Without corporate settai in Japan, hostess clubs would almost totally disappear tomorrow.

The money that is supposed to be paying female workers equal wages gets funneled into entertainment kick backs for older male managers and then paid out to women only when they will entertain. Pretty great system if you are an old guy! I wonder who has all the economic and political power in Japan…

“Are corporate dollars the main source of revenue for strip clubs in the US?”

No, but this does not explain why a similarly huge (or more huge) practice that can be described as exploitation of working class women is going on in America (and Canada, etc.). If one is a trap that ensnares women, the other should be too.

Also, while the definition of hostess work as part of the “sex industry” is open for debate, I think that stripping is easier to define as sex work. It also seems a lot harder for the women. If given a choice to pole dance or to do what hostesses do for the same money, I think that I’m not out of line assuming that most American strippers would jump at the chance to go the Japanese way.

M-bone makes excellent points re: strippers/hostesses. I’d also like to mention that several female friends/acquaintances of mine -who were neither very poor nor from the inaka- worked as hostesses in their 20′s because the money’s good (none of them felt they were doing anything equivalent to prostitution either). Marxy’s points about how corporate entertainment accounts support hostess clubs are accurate, but I think you paint the workers in mizu shobai with far to broad a brush
when their is a huge amount of variation.

man, when did this blog start getting run by 70 year old’s? it’s playboy! what does anyone expect? i thought i was only a legidement magazine when trying to argue with the lady, when you have one.. and or, are 12. or work for american apparel. and shit, yall are on loop.
wtf.

No, it’s not Playboy. It’s Weekly Playboy, which is totally unrelated at this point besides the fact that they have naked women.

I’d also like to mention that several female friends/acquaintances of mine -who were neither very poor nor from the inaka- worked as hostesses in their 20’s because the money’s good

A lot of women — especially college students — tend to work as hostesses part-time. When you look at who becomes “career hostesses,” often in lieu of tertiary education, that’s when you would see the demographic bias.

Sex industries exist everywhere, even in the United States where they are in theory illegal and stigmatized. You probably can’t perfectly stop them.

But the political and economic system has to answer for subsidizing them, while also paying women vastly inferior wages and offering them vastly fewer opportunities to move into the upper reaches of power. Strip clubs are probably “worse” than hostess clubs, but they are not part of the formal system of commerce in the United States (and probably other places.) Settai is a huge thing in Japan — preconditioned on management being all male — and so you therefore have direct linkage between commercial industry and the sex industry. The question is then one of formal sanction and support.

Take the end of WWII. Obviously, the Occupation would create huge demand for brothels, but Japan’s top leaders formally planned a giant brothel system that required the induction of tens of thousands of young women — a lot of war orphans with no experience being prostitutes — to service dozens of GIs a day. The U.S. shares a blame for tolerating this for its first four or five months, but the question goes back to “sanction” rather than the inevitability of sexual commerce.

it’s still “playboy”. it can be weekly all it wants. i doubt people are thinking about what a great publication it is. complaining about a “playboy” related product just sorta.. seems to be just doing what they are asking. like a boycott of a violent video game.

“A lot of women — especially college students — tend to work as hostesses part-time. When you look at who becomes “career hostesses,” often in lieu of tertiary education, that’s when you would see the demographic bias.”

Replace “hostesses” with “strippers” and the comment 100% true of the USA.

You earlier made the point that it is the “elite of the system” that exploit hostesses in Japan and that it is “average guys” that pay strippers for their services in the United States. I’m having a hard time thinking that one is so much better or worse than the other.

I take your point that a “system” exists in Japan that often pays women crap wages and that this increases the attractiveness of hostess jobs.

In the United States, working class people without education, however, are also locked into low paying jobs in most cases. This trend has gotten worse over the past decade by any measure. It applies to men and women, so is this equal opportunity exploitation? The end result is the same – working class women get dumped into sex work in disproportionately high numbers.

On a similar note, are young Japanese men being exploited any less by a system that clearly favors rich old men (is there a system out there that doesn’t favor rich old men?). Mika might be hostessing, but Ichiro is breaking his back lifting boxes for 650 yen an hour. I saw a recent statistic that 37% of Japanese employees are now part time or on short term contracts. The most awful, strenuous work in Japan is being dumped on the young working class. Hostessing, like stripping, offers a better paying way out of the grind for many people. I wish this wasn’t so – but it seems to be part and parcel of post-industrial capitalism. With lower paying service jobs and retail the real “growth area” in these societies, working class women are going to be targets.

We need a radically new paradigm. But nothing from radical feminism to Christian fundamentalism has saved working class women in the United States.

“Are corporate dollars the main source of revenue for strip clubs in the US? My guess is that private usage accounts for most. Without corporate settai in Japan, hostess clubs would almost totally disappear tomorrow.”

Are corporate dollars the main income for hostess clubs or Kyaba? Id have to see the data to believe this. In fact i think your bullshitting. from the many times ive been, almost all the customers are single or small groups. For example if i go with my manager and two co-workers, my manager pays the majority – but he pays this out of his social expenses budget which is part of his pay. Granted we do take customers to these places after kondankai’s and pay out of the company 交際費 budget, but as this would be ２nd or 3rd establishment of the night, the numbers would have decreased dramatically. We spend far more on food and drinks at izakayas then we do at hostess clubs. Granted, hostess clubs probably get a strong influx of cash at 年末年始 and in april 入会, but strip clubs also get huge rushes when the republican national convention is in town.

Lastly, this is getting long, but you greatly underestimate the structural and cultural factors that prevent more women from entering the management ranks(i think you also understate the structural disadvantages of rural life in Japan as well), and the gorilla in the room is that most women in Japan want to get married and have children and quit work for at least several years if not longer. Now you could make changes (flex time, maternity leave, etc) but this is going to but heads with governmental and private initiatives to implement more family friendly policies and increase the birth rate.

On the connections between “housewives” and “structural problems” in Japan and the United States -

Women have been well integrated into the work force in the United States. That is undeniable. However, there are significant amounts of discrimination remaining at the top and bottom of the pyramid. For example, of the top 500 companies in the United States, only 11 (2 percent) have female CEOs at present. The figure for Japan is 5 (1 percent). I would guess that the great majority of these in both cases are women who have started their own companies. The USA does “better” than Japan in this area, but what a Pyrrhic victory it is.

What does the bottom of the pyramid look like? The elite in the United States has responded historically to the increased participation of women in the workplace by putting downward pressure on salaries across the board. This has been one of the factors behind the snail’s pace of real salary growth since the 1970s. Combine this with high mortgage rates – about 8% on a normal mortgage last time I looked – and it has not only become normal, but necessary for both partners in a relationship to work. This situation has serious linkages with the sub-prime fiasco – which has mostly been narrated as an economic meltdown but is also a wide-reaching human tragedy. In any case, as a result of all this, working class women are slotted into all sorts of low paying and / or unpleasant jobs because no other social options exist. The lack of choice has also been used (to some degree) to explain higher crime rates, etc.

What does the picture look like in Japan? With mortgages available at 1% (and legislation exists to help lower income buyers), the pressure of tens of thousands of dollars of interest is taken off the backs of Japan’s working class. As a result, one salary, even a working class salary, is often enough to raise a family. This presents another “escape route” to Japanese women – the housewife role that is celebrated in Japanese public space rather than scorned. Is this ideal? No. Is it a structural factor that forces working class women into all sorts of bad situations in the United States and allows for different options in Japan? I think that it is.

When the floodgates of cross-cultural structural comparison get opened….

This obviously isn’t the place for the ultimate structural comparison, and no country can claim total victory.

But obviously, or what I thought was obviously, closing the male-female wage gap is a desirable goal. Being part of the “asshole faction” means you are desperate to keep “progress” from getting in the way of your ritual ego-rubbing. I don’t see more occupational freedom and advancement for women exactly helping recruiting for Japan’s giant sex industry. Is it too much to see “gender equality” as inversely correlated to sex industry size, at least in Japan?

It works as a criticism limited to Japan. At the very least it is something concrete that we can talk about.

I also think that wage parity is a desirable goal. When achieved, however, I’m not sure that the sex industry (and I think that it is more profitable to talk about hostessing as separate) shrinks as long as the working class are exploited – what seems like a common pattern. So maybe parity does not equal a shrinking sex industry and maybe the lack of parity is not the best explanation of the present bloating of the industry.

The USA is being increasingly used as a nightmarish vision of what Japan’s future might be like (kakusa, crime, less social service, etc.) in Japanese progressive publishing. It very well could provide a vision of the future of sex industries as well.

Or maybe things will get better. When the generation of “assholes” who are in their prime now, guys that I assume first started to hit their stride when things were heating up in the late 1980s, start to pop off, things could improve (or they could get worse).

As far as Britain goes, the boom in strip clubs and lapdancing bars was almost entirely fuelled by corporate entertainment. Strippers from, say, the main London branch of Spearmint Rhino would regularly turn up in the financial districts around early evening, accompanied by a truck with a huge advertising board and spend time handing out discount vouchers to city workers. Here’s part a recent news article entitled “Is Spearmint Rhino endangered?”:

“Spearmint Rhino, the lapdancing club where millionaire City traders famously entertain clients, has fallen on hard times. The Tottenham Court Road venue has been losing its high-spending punters amid a new, more sombre mood in the Square Mile, according to its latest financial figures…In its heyday the club – which opened in 2000 – attracted professionals from the legal and accounting worlds…In one legal case, City boss Xavier Alcan of Cantor Fitzgerald told a judge: ‘On a good night at Spearmint Rhino you can see 80 per cent of the market.’”

There are a couple of discussions about hostess clubs on your site but, since this is where you have tied them together with Weekly Playboy, I wonder what you make of the fact that a paper like the Asahi has covered the nomination of the Kita Shinchi Queen. The winner, Club Ueda’s Mariko Fujisaki, describes her interests as “Golf and dohan”.